-Live Mint India needs a law to check the menace of communal and caste violence. The arguments against it are spurious Among free India's gravest failures-along with its inability to end hunger, pervasive poverty and discrimination-is the continued targeting of people with violence and arson only because of their faith or caste. This periodic blood-letting, mass sexual assault and arson leaves a trail of great suffering of innocents, and repeated assaults...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), sought to be empowered by the Prevention of Communal violence Bill to oversee action taken by the states to prevent and control Communal violence, has declined to monitor performance of duties by civil servants under the Act, saying that it was for their superiors to do so. The human rights body also insisted that collecting information on communal build-ups...

-The Hindu There is no disparagement of subsidies in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh because those who attack the social welfare policies of the Congress regard them as examples of good governance by a party of the Right Three propositions dominate explanations of the Congress party's rout, the Bharatiya Janata Party's impressive victory and the Aam Aadmi Party's stunning success in Delhi in the recent Assembly elections. One, that there is a strong...

-The Hindu     With the closing of relief camps in Muzaffarnagar, even the meagre food support has disappeared. As the winter cold descends this year on Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts in Western U.P., some 20,000 people will camp in makeshift unofficial camps amidst squalor and official neglect, or survive in small rented tenements or with relatives - exiles from the villages of their birth. Three months after one of the grimmest communal outbreaks...

-The Hindu The camps were set up in the aftermath of September's Communal violence MUZAFFARNAGAR: Three months after the high-profile visits of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Congress President Sonia Gandhi to various relief camps, riot-affected Muslims belonging to at least half-a-dozen villages are still to return to their native villages. Large scale violence that erupted in this sugarcane belt in August-September this year has a left deep scar on the psyche of these...